Is your Pinterest audience growing fast enough?

Tuesday, July 07, 2015

A lot of Pinterest marketers use their rate of follower growth as a key success metric. Do you know how fast your audience is growing? If so, chances are you would love to know how your growth rate measures up against other pinners. BoardBooster Labs has been studying follower growth for nearly a year, and we are finally ready to share our findings.

The first thing that we learned was that the rate of follower growth depends a lot on the current size of your audience. When you are just starting up, it's relatively easy to achieve a high rate of growth. But then it becomes increasingly harder until you get to around 10,000 followers. An average account with 10,000 followers is growing only by 4% per month.

There is a good news though - once you get over 10,000 followers your growth is likely to start accelerating. Pinners with 70,000 followers are growing nearly 4 times faster than pinners with 10,000 followers. Of course, this "easy growth" does not last forever, and by the time you get to a million followers it becomes extremely hard to grow any further. The chart below shows the monthly follower growth rate as a function of your current number of followers.

This leads us to a couple of interesting questions:

What if my growth rate is below these average levels? Sometimes this can be totally normal. Your growth can be impacted by a number of factors such as seasonality of your content and your geographic location. Pinners located in countries where Pinterest's audience is growing faster appear to be able to grow their audiences faster. Having said this, if you are not satisfied with your current growth, there are plenty of opportunities to improve it, such as improving the quality of your pins, becoming a more active pinner, and making sure that your pins go out at the best possible time, which BoardBooster can help you accomplish.

How do I know if my growth rate is truly great? Thanks for asking! We've compared the growth rate of the top 10% fastest growing pinners to the average growth rate, and found that the top pinners manage to grow 3-4 times faster than average. You can use the chart below to see if you are in the top 10%.

That's it for today! Please send any questions or ideas for future BoardBooster Labs posts to Support@BoardBooster.com. Happy pinning!